Social Geographies of Poverty in Victorian and Edwardian London

Abstract

Abstract Early Victorian investigations of the “poor” in London often proved self-fulfilling prophecies, concentrated on localities already perceived as “rookeries.” In contrast to such surveys and to novels set in expected “slum” localities, Charles Booth’s massive survey of Life and Labour of the People in London, published in seventeen volumes between 1889 and 1903, aimed to be comprehensive, compiling comparative statistics at different scales, and objective, dispassionately mapping and tabulating information on “poverty” and, by implication, social and spatial inequality, across the entire city. However, the language and impressions conveyed by Booth’s researchers in their notebooks is often as subjective and judgmental as that of his predecessors. Nevertheless, Booth’s focus on mapping and assigning everybody to “poverty classes” shifts attention away from the problem of “slums” as inadequate built environments to more challenging questions concerning the extent and spatial distribution of poverty and inequality, indicating the need to focus on suburbs as much as the inner city, displacement following “slum clearance,” and the combined effects of geographical and socioeconomic marginalization.